What is...?

Over this busy festive season, stop and ask yourself "What is...what is this moment, what is in this moment, what do I experience, perceive, realise?" We so seldom do this. Our lives are full, day for day, minute for minute...and moment for moment. Life is not slow. Work is not forgiving. Even our "play time", our relaxation time is full of doing. Full of appointments and activities. So much of modern spiritual talk is about "being in the moment: - but what does that mean. Osho puts it beautifully, simply in his answer to a student's question below. Such moments of conscious awareness are meditation. Pure meditation. Tantra uses the senses to be in the moment. Sight, smell, sound and touch. You can do it anywhere. At Christmas dinner with the family, on the beach, in the mountains, the desert...and even in a busy shopping mall. It only takes a moment!

I wish you all, dear students and friends of Tantra, many moments of such beauty and calm over Christmas and the drawing year -end.
Namaste
Leandra

In one of his lectures, Prabhati (a student of Osho) asked: "Beloved Master, What Is?"
Osho answered:
"Prabhati, there are two kinds of things in existence: one, that which can be explained; and the other, that which can only be experienced. The things that can be explained are mundane, ordinary, have no intrinsic value in them. And the things that cannot be explained are really significant, have intrinsic value. For example, sex can be explained, love cannot be explained. Hence, sex becomes a commodity - it can be sold, it can be purchased. Love is not a commodity; you cannot sell it, you cannot purchase it - there is no way. Sex can be explained because it is part of physiology. Love cannot be explained - it is part of your inner mystery.

Unless your sexuality rises and reaches to love it is mundane, it has nothing sacred about it. When your sex becomes love, then it is entering into a totally different dimension - the dimension of the mysterious and the miraculous. Now it is becoming religious, sacred, it is no longer profane. And there is an even higher stage of love - I call it prayer - which is absolutely unexplainable, which is absolutely ineffable. Nothing can be said about it.

When a disciple asked Jesus, "What is prayer?" Jesus fell on his knees and started praying. What else can you do? Prayer cannot be explained, nothing can be said about it, but it can be shown. What can you say about death, what can you say about life? Whatsoever you say will fall short; it cannot soar to the heights of life and death. Those are experiences.

What can you say about beauty? Even if the lake is full of beautiful lotuses and it is a full-moon night, and all is benediction, somebody can ask, "What is beauty?" What can you say? You can show! You can say, "This it it!" But he will say, "I am asking for a definition."

Rabindranath, one of the greatest poets of this country (India), was living on a small houseboat. He used to live for months together on that houseboat; he loved living on the houseboat. It was a full-moon night and he was reading in his room, a small cabin, just by a small candlelight, and he was reading about aesthetics - what is beauty? And the full moon outside, and the cuckoo calling from the distant shore, and the moon reflecting all over the lake, and the whole lake was silver...! It was a tremendously silent night, nobody around, except that cuckoo calling. Once in a while a bird would fly over the boat, or a fish would jump in the lake - and those sounds would deepen the silence even more. And he pondered over great books on aesthetics in search of the definition of what beauty is.
Tired, exhausted, in the middle of the night, he blew out the candle...and he was shocked, surprised. As he blew out the candle, the moon-rays entered through the window, through the door, inside the cabin. That pale light of the candle had been keeping the moon out. Suddenly, he heard the cuckoo calling from the distant shore.

Suddenly, he became aware of the tremendous silence, the depth of the silence surrounding the boat. A fish jumped, and he came out.... He had never seen such a beautiful night. A few white clouds floating in the sky, and the moon and the lake and the cuckoo calling...he was transported into another world.

He wrote in his diary, "I am foolish! I have been searching in books for what beauty is, and beauty was standing outside my door, knocking on my door! I was looking for beauty, searching for beauty, with a small candle, and the small candlelight was keeping the moonlight outside." He wrote in his diary, "It seems my small ego is keeping God out - the small ego, like a pale small candlelight, keeping the light of God outside. And he is waiting outside. All that I need to do is to close the books, blow out the candle of the ego and go out - AND SEE!"

Prabhati, you ask me, "What is?" This...this-ness...this moment you are surrounded by the is. It is within you and without you. The chirping of the birds...and this silence...and you ask me what is? It is not a question that can be answered… We are here to experience something. All explanations about the mysteries of life are nothing but explaining away those things. The basic, root meaning of the word 'explanation' is 'to flatten a thing' - but to flatten a thing is to destroy it. If anybody could answer, "What is God? What is love? What is prayer? What is?" he would have flattened a beautiful, tremendously beautiful, incredible experience, into ugly words. All words are inadequate. Be and know! Be still and know! You are here not to learn more words; you are here to get deeper into silence. Use my words as hints towards a wordless existence. This is it! …

Feel this moment...in its totality, in all its dimensionality, and a great beauty will descend, a great beatitude, a great benediction will surround you; a grace, a very silent ecstasy will start rising in you…that is the only way to know it.”

From: The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol.2. by OSHO. Talks given from 01/07/79 to 10/07/79. English Discourse series.